


Comets

by perihadion



Series: Shadowboxing [4]
Category: The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: F/M, Falling In Love, Forehead Touching, Mandalorian Kiss, Touch-Starved, Unresolved Romantic Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-07
Updated: 2020-01-07
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:47:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22155760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perihadion/pseuds/perihadion
Summary: Cara and Din take a rare, quiet moment together after completing a job.
Relationships: Cara Dune/The Mandalorian (The Mandalorian TV)
Series: Shadowboxing [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1599208
Comments: 42
Kudos: 313





	Comets

**Author's Note:**

> Do not comment with Omera hate.

It was unusual for them, this moment of post-mission quiet. Most of the time when they worked together they would part ways as soon as the job was done. Maybe Mando — Din — was getting sentimental, Cara thought, or maybe — with a wry smile — he was relishing this time apart from the kid. Maybe she was starting to mean something to him.

The sky on this planet was clear and still. The stars seemed unusually bright. The alcohol she had drunk was making her poetic, she was thinking about how strange it was that the stars could seem so bright and mysterious when they could get on the Razor Crest and bring any one of the stars or a thousand planets to them.

They were sitting in the clear space of the village they had defended, looking out at the sky. Din had been silent for a long time. Cara craned her neck to look at him and wondered if he had fallen asleep.

“Can I ask you something?” she asked, testing the waters.

“Sure,” came the measured response. She smiled to herself. She knew he was asked about his culture, his religion, his choices all the time but he still rarely betrayed a hint of annoyance.

“If things had happened differently on Sorgan,” she said, “would you ever have considered staying with Omera?”

He took a long sigh, “No.”

“Why?” she said.

“Lots of reasons.” He took a long pause, and she thought that was the end of it, but then he said: “I have done a lot of things that Omera does not know about, and could not understand. There’s a part of me —”

He paused again, to find the words.

“The man that Omera thinks I am, I want to be. But I’m not. It would never feel right.”

Cara hated that she understood. It had been so easy to tease him, to suggest that he should just slip off his helmet and settle down with Omera. But they were both stained with blood, to their core. It wasn’t even a question of religion: even if he felt free to renounce the Way it didn’t change his past, who he was, the person he thought Omera could not understand. Maybe wearing the helmet was a type of penance.

“I know,” she said. “There’s a line. And when you cross it you can never go back.”

She thought of the Child, left with a local woman until their return. Din had knelt before him and promised to return, holding out his finger and letting the Child grasp it so that he could shake his little green hand. There was a soft, tender man underneath all that cold beskar. She wondered if that was the real reason why he could never remove it: to be known, to be seen, was more than he could bear in all of his softness and sensitivity. But she felt this strange urge to crack the hard shell open anyway, and get at the gooey yolk of him.

She hummed softly, and he tilted his head to look at her. “I was just surprised you didn’t mention the helmet,” she said.

“I thought it went without saying.”

They fell into silence after that.

“Maybe we should head back,” she said, after a while.

“Just a little longer,” he said, and she was surprised by the emotion in his voice. She looked at him, and he said “I — like this. There aren’t many moments like this.”

She felt her heart squeeze and — she didn’t know why, except that she felt an uncharacteristic need to be tender herself — reached out and gently ran her fingertips along his helmet, stroking what would be his cheek.

He turned his head into her touch, and said, “... That feels nice.”

“You can feel it?” she asked, surprised.

He nodded. “Like a vibration. The beskar isn’t just dead metal.”

She ran her hand along the edge of the helmet, and then over his cuirass. In a strange way it made sense that he could feel it. The beskar was a part of him, the way he moved through the world. It was so strange, to be doing something which felt so intimate with someone who was fully clothed.

He looked at her, and then did something surprising. He lifted his hand to her hair and brushed it gently back, and then pulled her in and touched his forehead to hers. A Mandalorian kiss. The shock of it and the coldness of the metal took her breath away. “That’s —” she began to say, and then closed her eyes, heart pounding. He began to pull away, and she stopped him, leaning forward to press her lips to his helmet, just above the visor.

“Can you feel that?” she asked, and put her hand over his chest — where, she imagined, she could feel just a vibration, an echo of his heartbeat.

“Yes,” he said, and he sounded just as breathless as she felt.

Cara didn’t know what her relationship with this strange man was. But she knew, in this moment, that they understood each other. That he meant something to her. They were like comets which passed each other every few cycles and they would part ways again after this night. But maybe in this moment they could reach out across the stars and brush fingertips before spiralling out into space in opposite directions. He was pulling her into him, and she lay her head on cold beskar and closed her eyes. Yes, maybe in this moment they could just have this.

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi on [twitter](http://twitter.com/theoceanblooms) or [tumblr](http://spectroscopes.tumblr.com)! If you really liked this fic, it would be lovely if you could [reblog](https://www.tumblr.com/reblog/190128637754/wgVB8SsM) on tumblr.
> 
> Also, I was partially inspired by this quote from _Sputnik Sweetheart_ and I figured I should put it in the notes:
> 
> _And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they're nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing._


End file.
